Europe at the end of the agricultural
age was going through changes made possible by industrialization. Efficiency
was a new goal, and size was a primary method for acquiring efficiency.
Large organizations provided an economy of scale that drove down costs.
Lower costs and competition started to drive down prices of goods. The
predecessor of the middle class, the trade guilds, were doomed by these
economies of scale. Agricultural workers were being displaced by machinery,
and being trained to operate other machinery. There was a migration
not just from farm to city, but there was also a personal migration
from being a serf in a feudal society toward independence.

(To
those screaming about the horrors of the industrial age; please
yourself if you wish to live in a wattle and daub hut surviving
on gruel while experiencing famines, slavery, and plagues.
Rational people tend to prefer the
better life offered by an open
capitalist society. Don't demand others give up their lives by spieling
your emotional screed reinforced with factual errors; and don't procure
some government busybody to demand it of others for you. That is
still
theft.
)

"Sometimes the law defends plunder
and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame
and danger that their acts would otherwise involve. But how is this
legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from
some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons
to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the
expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without
committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay; No legal plunder;
this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and
logic." - Bastiat

"The
sort of dependence that results from exchange, i.e., from commercial
transactions, is a reciprocal dependence. We cannot be dependent upon
a foreigner without his being dependent on us. Now, this is what constitutes
the very essence of society. To sever natural interrelations is not
to make oneself independent, but to isolate oneself completely"
- Bastiat.

"By
virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others."
- Bastiat

Functions
previously performed in the private sector, such as insurance and education,
were appropriated by the state. Advances in transportation design and
organization made free trade a major political issue. France centralized
and regulated social arrangements under a national banner. Laws were
created that hurt consumers and small businesses, while favoring one
person, location, or class. Reaction to unjust applications of The
Law impelled Bastiat to some of his greatest works.
"But we assure the socialists that we repudiate only forced
organization, not natural organization. We repudiate the forms of association
that are forced upon us, not free association. We repudiate forced fraternity,
not true fraternity. We repudiate the artificial unity that does nothing
more than deprive persons of individual responsibility. We do not repudiate
the natural unity of mankind under Providence." - Bastiat

"Life, faculties, production,
in other words, individuality, liberty, property, this is man. And in
spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts
from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life,
liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the
contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand
that caused men to make laws in the first place."
- Bastiat

"When law and morality contradict
each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his
moral sense or losing his respect for the law."
- Bastiat

"Each of us has a natural right,
from God, to defend his person, his liberty, and his property."
- Bastiat

Feudal agriculture forced people to be married to the land and allied
to a lord. The industrial revolution offered a chance to innovate and
develop. This presented a frightening prospect if for generations your
family had not traveled more than a few miles from home. The options
for the ambitious were rapidly increasing, although for many the promise
of a better life would take time to fulfill. The once stratified society
was becoming more fluid, with more opportunity, and with different and
greater risks. This is again the case, adaptable knowledge workers are
finding opportunity in another technological revolution. The changes
are more rapid this time, the risks and rewards are greater. Conversion
to a network society presents a frightening prospect to a sedentary
work force untrained for rapid social order transitions.

"Property, the right to enjoy
the fruits of one's labor, the right to work, to develop, to exercise
one's faculties, according to one's own understanding, without the state
intervening otherwise than by its protective action; this is what is
meant by liberty" - Bastiat

"Now, legal plunder can be committed
in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of
plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies,
encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed
jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right
to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these
plans as a whole, with their common aim of legal plunder, constitute socialism."
- Bastiat

"No legal plunder: This is the
principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony, and logic. Until
the day of my death, I shall proclaim this principle with all the force
of my lungs (which alas! is all too inadequate)."
- Bastiat

In
Bastiat's time society was at a nexus. With the inception of the industrial
age the moribund trade guilds were doomed by increasing economies of
scale. This new age also contributed to the creation of the skilled
middle class worker. We have entered a similar period today, in reverse.
The receding middle class is condemned as technology and robotics replace
repetitious manual tasks. This time the large institutions propelled
into existence by industrial age centralization will morph into the
smaller, more efficient networks demanded by the information age.

The
emerging information society will create a replacement for the middle
class; customer centric knowledge workers attuned to each clients specific
needs. This new class will exist in a network society composed of those
that think, know, and accomplish. We will call these new above average
individuals and teams the Netcohort. The netcohort already works
as small protean associations within the transformational structure
of an emerging Netcohort Society; mobilis in mobili.

"Everyone wants to live at the
expense of the state. They forget that the state wants to live at the
expense of everyone." - Bastiat

"Man is born a proprietor, because
he is born with wants whose satisfaction is necessary to life, and with
organs and faculties whose exercise is indispensable to the satisfaction
of these wants. Faculties are only an extension of the person; and property
is nothing but an extension of the faculties. To separate a man from
his faculties is to cause him to die; to separate a man from the product
of his faculties is likewise to cause him to die"
- Bastiat

"Often the masses are plundered
and do not know it." - Bastiat

The new social order may well revert to
old tribal ways, a cohort of small trusting groups, mobile and opportunistic.
The future looks toward a network society based on reputation, accomplishment,
and knowledge. The current school system is archaic, processing students
into social machine parts for a prior age. Those that succeed as the
new Netcohort will be knowledgeable and flexible; and they will continue
learning their entire lives. Renaissance
education, diverse knowledge combined with accomplishment, will
be necessary to prepare for the networking society. This style of learning
can be a pleasure as you study what you want and need to know.
Prepare yourself for societal transformation. We are crossing a bridge
to great opportunity.

"I
have seen countries in which the people think that agriculture
can make no progress unless the government supports experimental
farms; that there will soon be no horses if the government does
not provide studs; that fathers will not have their children
educated or will have them taught only immorality if the government
does not decide what is proper to learn. " - Bastiat

"When under the pretext of fraternity,
the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature
is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward
contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices.
Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly
not, but rather the most influential and calculating."
- Bastiat

"Men naturally rebel against
the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized
by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes
try somehow to enter, by peaceful or revolutionary means, into the making
of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered
classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they
attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful
plunder, or they may wish to share in it."
- Bastiat

The usefulness of the wisdom of Bastiat
is based on parallels of his age to ours, and on contrasts. Our main
difference with Bastiat's era is the vector of institutional growth.
In Bastiat's France the incipient industrial revolution favored large
vertically integrated organizations. Today information management and
miniaturization technologies necessitate increasingly smaller organizations.

Society can move toward competitive and
market efficient small groups, or toward violent and closed tribal units.
Bastiat's works take on new meaning as they lay a course of justice
for use in the transition.

" We cannot but be astonished
at the ease with which men resign themselves to ignorance about what
is most important for them to know; and we may be certain that they
are determined to remain invincibly ignorant if they once come to consider
it as axiomatic that there are no absolute principles."
- Bastiat

"If you wish to prosper, let your
customer prosper. When people have learned this lesson, everyone will
seek his individual welfare in the general welfare. Then jealousies
between man and man, city and city, province and province, nation and
nation, will no longer trouble the world."
- Bastiat

"Away
with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects,
their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their
state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations,
their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious
moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely
inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they
should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for
liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works."
- Claude
Frederic Bastiat